Born in Kirkland Lake, Ontario in 1947, Marian Fraser has been a freelance writer and broadcaster, working as a host, narrator and documentary maker in radio and educational television. She frequently contributed to CBC Radio's Ideas. For two years she followed the U.S./Canada borderline and its numbered monuments that date to 1776 to produce a study of shared history, Walking the Line: Travels Along the Canadian/American Border (D&M, 1989). "I wanted to step outside the official boundary crossings to discover what the border actually is and what its inhabitants feel about living there,"; she says. "It is a vital strip of shared history, mythology and landscape. I wrote this book after doing a five-hour series of documentaries on the subject for the CBC Radio program IDEAS. In 2001, the border is once again the subject of discussion, as North America seriously considers the idea of a perimeter border for security reasons. Will this richly annotated margin in our history, which has always been of greater importance symbolically to Canadians than to Americans, become an anachronism?";

In 1999, Fraser began a journey across Canada to investigate the lives of Canadian single women. She met and interviewed women from the Gulf islands in the west to the coves of Newfoundland. She went to small prairie and northern towns and all the major cities. The result was Solitaire: The Intimate Lives of Single Women (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2001). "Writing this book was also for me a journey through my own experience,"; she says. "Growing up as we all did with deeply held ideas and fantasies about love and marriage, marrying in my twenties, becoming a mother in my thirties, and divorcing in my forties.";

[BCBW 2003] "Women"